medicine
oracknows | October 26, 2009I really have to apologize to the Young Australian Skeptics. I screwed up. I didn't do my duty as organizer of The Skeptics' Circle. The Aussies provided a bang-up edition of the 122nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, and I didn't even promote it.
So I'm promoting it now. Go. Read. Enjoy.
Then join us back a week from Thursday (i.e., November 5) when Blue Genes will be hosting.
ddobbs | October 26, 2009In a disturbing post at ScienceInsider, Jon Cohen and Martin Enserink explain why the swine flu vaccine is running so late. Or at least they try to explain why it's so late. For while all the suppliers are running into problems, we're not allowed to know what they are.
The delays are substantial and critical. They leave us naked as the flu spreads through the country. The flu has now killed 1000 people, over 100 of them children. Even as this happens, the delivery dates keep moving back and the delivery amounts keep shrinking. As recently as a month ago, the CDC was telling us that we'd…
oracknows | October 26, 2009I had meant to address this topic last week, but the whole Suzanne Somers thing bubbled up and overwhelmed my blogging attention. Regular readers of this blog probably realize that I tend to live and die as a blogger by the maxim that if some is good more must be better. So I clobbered the topic with three posts in rapid succession. Now that that's out of the way, I can address topics that readers have been bugging me about sending to me.
At or near the top of the list has to be a biased and poorly framed article that appeared in The Atlantic this month. I tell ya, I've been a subscriber to…
palmd | October 25, 2009I try not to overbook at my office. I have about 16 slots every morning for returning patients (fewer if I have new patients booked, which I usually do). I usually schedule, counting new and old patients, 12 patients every morning. If I were to cut my appointment slots down to 10 minutes instead of 15, I could really pack 'em in, and I may have to do that some day, but with the 15 minute slots, I can usually squeeze in people who want to walk in because they're sick. There's only so much that can be done to control the flow; if someone has chest pain, I'm going to be running late from…
palmd | October 25, 2009My county health department released 10K doses of H1N1 vaccine yesterday and opened up two distribution centers for them. With all the anti-vaccination craziness out there, I was worried no one would show.
Turns out, no need to worry.
My friend went yesterday and waited for four hours with thousands of other people. From a public health perspective, perhaps it would have been better to have multiple smaller centers to avoid exposure, but people did not wait inside in crowded rooms, but outside in the wind. That's probably better, but who knows. At a time when mass vaccination is needed,…
oracknows | October 24, 2009I'd like to thank revere right now publicly. He's taught me a new word:
Methodolatry: The profane worship of the randomized clinical trial as the only valid method of investigation.
Many of my readers have e-mailed me about a recent article in The Atlantic by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer, two reporters whose particular bias is that we as a nation are "over treated." That may be true, although not to the extent that Brownlee, at least, seems to think, and her article on swine flu was truly execrable. Moreover, "methodalatry" perfectly describes one of my complaints about the "evidence-…
oracknows | October 23, 2009Thank you, Mike Adams. You've saved my blogging posterior yet again.
What do I mean? Well, I had originally intended to do a lucid, insightful, penetrating analysis of a scientific study today. However, when I got home last night after a hard day in clinic I was just too tired. So, faced with that, I had a choice: either no bloggy for you tomorrow, or I could take on something that wasn't quite so--shall we say?--demanding, something more in line with what my fragile eggshell mind could deal with after a 12 hour day at work.
Enter woo-meister supreme, Mike Adams. And, boy, is he ticked off.…
palmd | October 23, 2009I got home pretty late last night. The last week or two has seen a huge rise in influenza-like illness (ILI). Late in the evening, I began to get a scratchy throat and chills, but sometimes fatigue can feel like flu. I went home and had a nice dinner and a shower and felt a bit better.
At about 3 a.m., a little knock on the bedroom door woke me from a deep sleep. My daughter walked in crying, "my throat hurts!" She never gets up in the middle of the night. My wife sent me to the other room to sleep, gave her some motrin, and lay back down. Within a half an hour, the kiddo broke into a…
oracknows | October 22, 2009Before I move on for a while from the topic of that faded 1970s comic actress, Suzanne Somers, whose latest book is a paean to cancer quackery and who has been carpetbombing the airwaves with burning napalm stupid, I think one revelation is worth a brief mention. Specifically, after my post about how I find Somers' story about being misdiagnosed with cancer, a fan wrote:
Orac,
Sarcoidosis? Nope. Wrong again. Suzanne admitted on TV she had an acute pulmonary fungal infection, valley fever. Try going back to medical school, you mental midget.
I do so love the adoration of my fans. However, it…
palmd | October 22, 2009As many of my readers are aware, most of us are going to need two flu shots this year: one for the seasonal flu, and one for the pandemic (swine) flu. I got my seasonal flu shot two weeks ago, and I'm taking the family to the community college up the street this weekend for our pandemic shots. It's not going to be a lot of fun holding my daughter down, but she's been hospitalized in the past with breathing problems so we're not taking any chances.
There's yet a third flu shot out this year. It's called the "Emergen-C Shot". I saw it on TV advertised homonymically as "emergency shot",…
oracknows | October 22, 2009I hadn't planned on writing about Suzanne Somers again so soon. After all, I haven't yet received the promotional copy of her book (Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer--And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place) that a most generous reader has sent to me, and I didn't think I'd have a chance until a few days after the book arrived. However, something's been bothering me since yesterday's post, and it's bothering me enough that I think it deserves a followup post of its own. I alluded to it briefly during part of my post, but I really think it's something to be…
oracknows | October 22, 2009Apparently, some of my readers in Canada are getting this when they look at any of my Suzanne Somers posts:
No other country seems to be affected; at least, no readers from other countries have reported the problem to me.
This will not do. The Overlords have been informed. In the meantime, if you are in Canada, I apologize. Ads for such rank quackery and misinformation have no more place on ScienceBlogs than the creationist ads that popped up a while ago. Fortunately, from my locale, I have not been able to replicate the problem. However, if you are in a country other than Canada and see…
palmd | October 21, 2009I get a lot of comments hostile to doctors, and I'm OK with that. Going to a doctor can be comforting, painful, humiliating, frightening, or all of the above. Doctors can be saints, assholes, and everything in between. But there are two phenomena I find puzzling. One is the act of "punishing" the doctor by not taking care of yourself, the other the idea that the doctor should take care of you for free.
We pay doctors for their professional expertise. We hope that they will behave as compassionate professionals, but as human beings, we often fail. I strive to be compassionate, and teach…
oracknows | October 21, 2009There are two times a year that seem to be a time to beware of a serious assault of pseudoscience and quackery. The first time of year is in April, which is Autism Awareness Month. Over the last few years I can be just as sure as night following day, only to be followed by day again, that the anti-vaccine movement will use the occasion of Autism Awareness month to hit the airwaves with a blistering barrage of brain-dead buffoonery about vaccines and autism. This year, it consisted of Jenny McCarthy hitting Larry King Live with her equally brain dead boyfriend Jim Carrey, as well as Generation…
palmd | October 20, 2009Michigan has suffered enough. We've been devastated by economic and manufacturing changes, leading to mass unemployment, poverty, and poor education. That last one is really killing us.
According to news reports, more than half of Michiganders plan to forgo vaccination, mostly for reasons that betray a lack of education. This is at a time when schools across the state are closing their doors because of the flu. They aren't closing their doors out of irrational fears, or for quarantine or isolation purposes, but because so many people are sick that it's not worth it to keep the doors open…
oracknows | October 20, 2009Somehow I missed this when it first aired last week, but...take that, Bill Maher:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Doubt Break '09
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor
Ron Paul Interview
oracknows | October 20, 2009...be sure to check out Dr. John Snyder's article on vaccines on the official blog of the NYC Skeptics. As a pediatrician practicing in areas with high levels of resistance to vaccines, he's on the front lines.
oracknows | October 19, 2009Many have been the times over the last five years that I've called out bad journalism about medicine in general and vaccines in particular, especially the coverage of the discredited notion that vaccines or mercury in vaccines somehow was responsible for the "autism epidemic." That's why I feel a special responsibility to highlight good reporting on the issue. Indeed, reporting on this issue is so uniformly awful that when I see something this good, I want to do everything in my power to hawk the hell out of it. So, I want you to read this article in the November issue of WIRED Magazine…
palmd | October 19, 2009A few weeks ago, I wrote a little about hospitals "dumping" patients. At least around here, it's a rare problem. But what about people who don't get dumped but have no place to go?
Let's take "Mrs. Anton". She's 68 years old and has metastatic breast cancer. She's going to die of the disease, but probably not this week or next. She is admitted to the hospital for a fall, but nothing is broken and there's no reason to keep her. Her husband has been caring for her, but he's a little guy and can't handle the day-to-day care which includes cleaning her, changing her diaper (she can't get to…
palmd | October 19, 2009There is so much bad health reporting out there that sometimes I forget that there are still some reporters out there who know how to do more than google. A recent issue of Forbes features a report by Mattew Herper about human papilloma virus as a cause for some head and neck cancers. It's written at a level most literate lay-people can understand, and doesn't mangle the science or depend on sensationalism.
A recent issue of wired (h/t Orac) features an article by Amy Wallace on the anti-vaccine movement---a must-read.
Kudos to you, Matthew and Amy